Anyone watching television in 2015 could be forgiven for thinking that every single human being under 30 years old is awful. You’ve got Channel 4’s Not Safe For Work, where Zawe Ashton plays Katherine, a rude, emotionally manipulative, patronising civil servant who’s surrounded at work by liars, idiots and addicts. Comedy Central’s Workaholics follows three selfish man-children whose only loyalty is to getting wasted. Student sitcom Fresh Meat is back on Channel 4 this autumn – starring Jack Whitehall as the posh, snobby, Archbishop of Banterbury JP – while last year’s Glue saw teenagers literally murdering their best friends. And who could forget Broad City, also on Comedy Central: two stoners who eat out of dumpsters, clean rich people’s flats naked for cash and throw up while FaceTiming each other. In short: TV’s new trend is awful, unlikable young leads.

Not Safe for Work: is it This Life for a new generation?

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Obviously, most teenagers and twentysomethings are horrible. Show me one that’s entirely altruistic, kind and without a bad word to say about anyone and I’ll show you a sociopath hiding in plain sight. But this trend – the one that’s got you watching incredibly unsympathetic people on telly – actually reflects life for young people right now. For most people under 30, prospects are bleak.

The biggest challenge in today’s society is to smile tightly and explain yet again to your mum that yes, your friend from school married a banker and bought a three-bedroom house in Surrey, but no, you can’t afford to move out of your mouldy flatshare just yet. Youth unemployment is at its worst for 20 years, with 16- to 24-year-olds three times as likely to be unemployed as any other section of the population, and even if you have a job, more likely than not it’s a dead-end one. Digital culture has hardly helped, adding revenge porn, trolls and stranger-shaming to the list of uncomfortable modern obstacles. Everything’s pretty rubbish and there’s very little room for optimism.

Hardly surprising, then, if people decide that the only way to survive is to become tough, rude and willing to trample over anyone who gets in your way – whether for a job, a house, or that last table in the beer garden. To live in a nasty world, you have to be a nasty person. Honestly, if Friends had started in 2015, not 1994, it would be mocked off telly by cynical questions on Twitter asking how they could afford to sit in a coffee shop all day, or rent their massive flats on a waitress’s wage, or have such nice hair and be so unstoppably upbeat.

Trailer watch: Zawe Ashton in Channel 4's Not Safe for Work

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While we’re at it, there’s another factor at work here: the relentless rise of “banter”. Today, you can justify the most devastatingly crap persona. If we’re communicating in a string of insults, then it’s only natural that you should see it up on the screen. But, as JP from Fresh Meat would (probably) say: if you can’t take the bants, get out of the bantry.

Odious man/womanchildren are not an entirely new trend on telly. Nicholas Hoult was sneering it up in Skins way back in 2007. But now it’s ubiquitous; screenwriters have realised that audiences don’t need to love a lead character to watch a show. Girls has, of course, taught us that. No one watching it finds Lena Dunham’s Hannah Horvath anything other than teeth-grittingly unbearable (and don’t even get us started on Marnie) – yet the show is filming its fourth series right now. Maybe its enduring popularity is because, as Hannah’s life comes crashing down around her, again, you can’t help but feel a little thrill of schadenfreude. Rather than getting annoyed, you’re feeling comforted.

If you’re Hannah’s age, you’re happy she’s ruining her life much worse that you’re messing yours up. And if you’re older, it’s reassuring to see those millennials, with their Snapchats and their overconfidence, their easy assurance that, one day, they’ll take your job and retire you, will eventually get their comeuppance. Alternatively, these characters are so useless you root for them. Broad City adds extra empathy into the mix: Abby and Ilana may be rubbish employees, girlfriends and flatmates, but at least they care about each other, unlike the girls of Girls, all self-centred and only out for themselves.

Currently this trend shows no sign of slowing – it’s even making the leap to film. It’s no coincidence that John Niven’s Kill Your Friends is finally getting its big-screen adaptation, out in November, with Nicholas Hoult (him again) playing the ultimate hateful antihero, the psychotic Steven Stelfox. He makes the rest of us look like Gandhi holding a kitten. At least in this age of self-loathing, there are plenty of fictional people to hate more than ourselves.

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